Streamlining the value engineering process and its impact on building energy performance

Value Engineering (VE), as used in building design and construction projects, aims to identify opportunities to reduce construction cost, optimize the performance of the future building, reduce future operating expenses and cost, shorten building delivery time, and possibly avoid (future) legal problems and litigation. In its current practice, VE action typically focuses on issues for which quantitative data are on hand (i.e. reduction of construction cost based on cost estimates), while leaving to speculation the assessment of the impact of a given construction cost reduction on the future building's performance. Most new building designs include features and measures to minimize energy consumption; but, once in use, such buildings often fail to meet their energy performance expectations. Analyses of design histories usually show that the planned and designed energy efficiency features and measures were eliminated due to blunt cost cutting in VE events. This paper describes Performance Based Value Engineering (PBVE), which can mitigate problems encountered in standard VE events. It employs semi-automatic generation of input for simulation of building energy performance, which enables quick delivery of predicted energy performance and operating cost to provide a quantitative counter argument to blunt cost cutting.